


spare me over

by bereft_of_frogs



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Avengers Tower, Canon Compliant, Case Fic, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Grief/Mourning, Hydra (Marvel), Loki's Scepter (Marvel), Post-HYDRA Reveal, Post-Thor: The Dark World, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), SHIELD, Thor (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Thor is sad and Loki is the scepter that's what this is, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-10 17:02:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,861
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20138905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bereft_of_frogs/pseuds/bereft_of_frogs
Summary: O Death, won't you spare me over 'til another year...Thor gives up the throne and runs from Asgard, but cannot run from his grief.Until Tony Stark calls with a proposition to reunite the Avengers, and Thor goes looking for a way to say goodbye to his brother for good.





	spare me over

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: there's some genre-typical discussions of violence, suicide (think 'caught Cold War era spy'), and torture, but all happens non-graphically, off-screen. 
> 
> Note the time tag: I know a lot of the subject/themes/summary could be applied to post-Endgame but this is **post-The Dark World/pre-Age of Ultron**, because I'm showing up to this fandom five years late with Starbucks.

Halfway through the movie, he has to leave.

Thor leaves Jane in the theater with her friends and flees. He thinks about hiding in the bathroom, but needs air. Fresh, cool air on his face. So he turns towards the exit.

The movie theater lobby is nearly deserted when he emerges, just two teenagers manning the concession stand. He gives them a half smile - barely holding himself together - and holds his phone like he’s going to take a call. The pair start to excitedly whisper when he passes. The residents of this small New Mexico town where Jane is doing her summer field research have largely gotten used to his presence, but he still generates rumors. Gossip. Can’t give them any indication something is wrong. Must hold himself together, hold his composure. Just as he always had. Crown prince, famous Avenger. Things have not changed overmuch since he left Asgard.

The desert night is blissfully cool. He leans against the rough brick of the cinema and stares out at the nearly empty parking lot. When he is sure he is alone, he gives in to the gasping breaths, the tremor in his hands. He lets his composure drop and gives in to the sucking void of grief.

Jane finds him there, once some of the pain has burned itself out of him. “I’m sorry,” She gasps. “I’m so sorry, I should have looked up the plot beforehand, when Em suggested it, I had no idea-”

“It’s not your fault,” Thor says. “I merely…”

“I know,” She says. “We’ll be more careful next time.”

“No, it will be fine.” He smiles faintly. “I will learn to live with this. I will have to - and I’ve done so before.” His voice cracks on the last and he clears his throat. “It will just take some time.”

“Of course. Of _course_ it will take time. Thor, I’m not expecting you to just get over this. I honestly would be kind of concerned if you did. At least you’re not in denial, you’re _facing_ this.”

He hadn’t faced it, not at first. When everything had settled down, after the Convergence, he had entered a state where he just couldn’t _quite_ believe Loki was dead. He had held his corpse in his arms and yet he still expected Loki to appear around every corner. Fear it, if he was honest with himself. The first time his little brother had come back a snarling and furious thing, a creature possessed. A conqueror, out for blood. Would Thor recognize what returned the second time?

He had let slip his expectations to Jane and watched a pitying look dawn on her face. It was crushing, the realization of how pathetic his hopes were. He had accepted it then, that Loki was truly gone and now he felt like he was constantly a moment away from tumbling into an abyss. Reminders lurk around every corner, pushing him into that yawning pit of grief. This Earthly film’s plot was merely the latest in a long line of pains triggered by these small reminders.

“Come on,” Jane holds out her hand. “Let’s go home. I told Em and Mike that you’d gotten an urgent call. I let them assume it was from SHIELD. They were very impressed.”

Thor smiles. “Thank you, Jane.” He takes her hand and allows her to lead him to the car, to return to the small apartment they share in the peaceful desert town.

Several days later, Thor gets a call from Tony Stark.

“Hey, big guy!” Stark cries when he picks up. “Listen, we’ve got a little scavenger hunt we’re going on and we could really use your help.”

So Thor flies to New York, arriving on the tower’s landing pad with a storm in his wake. In the lab at the top of Stark Tower, he finds Bruce Banner reviewing data.

“Hey, man,” Bruce says and they clasp hands. “Wild time in London, I heard.”

Thor grins and sets Mjolnir on the floor, out of the way. “Nothing I could not handle.”

“No doubt. Tony’s just gone to pick up Steve and Nat from the airport. They’re coming in from DC. Clint’s driving, he should be here in a couple hours.” Bruce closes the folder. “Tony wants us all to have dinner before the briefing. Then I’ll explain what we dragged you here for.” He waves the folder. “I’d love to hear more about what happened in London in the meantime.”

They settle in to wait and Thor tells him a heavily edited version of the Convergence and the Aether. He leaves out Loki’s participation entirely and dances around his mother’s death. He tells a preferable version of reality, one where the incident was just one more heroic adventure. For a while, he can pretend that’s what is real and put aside his grief.

Bruce is the perfect audience. He’s fascinated by the Convergence itself and doesn’t notice at all the holes that Thor’s left in the story. He asks a lot of questions about the science, and Thor can gracefully steer him away from the more personal details.

“We’re back!” Tony calls as the elevator doors open. “Just in time for dinner.”

Dinner is a relaxed affair. They talk and laugh about some of their lighter misadventures since the fight against the Chitauri, discuss how cleanup is proceeding in the city. Thor neatly steers people away from talking about his own adventures, and he gets the sense that Steve is doing so as well. Steve only really talks about how he’s proceeding catching up on modernity, and Thor sticks to discussions of Jane’s work, of the things they’ve done during her summer research in New Mexico.

“We took a trip to what you call the Grand Canyon,” He says. “Jane was very impressed. I admit, it is quite large for a planet this size.”

“Sounds like you’ve seen bigger,” Natasha says with a crooked grin.

“You know, I’ve never actually seen the Grand Canyon,” Steve says. “Haven’t had the time. I did know this guy, Ed, that took off for California in ’36. Hitchhiked. He sent us back a postcard from the Grand Canyon, though I doubt it did it justice.”

“We've got to go!” Tony says. “Yeah, I’m sure I could get us a couple of suites at the spa in Sedona, I’m assuming you don’t want to camp out under the stars.”

“Camping…yeah, when not essential for survival, I’d rather not camp,” Bruce says.

“Come on, camping’s great.” Clint sets his bag on the floor with a thud. “Stars, campfire, _marshmallows_.”

“Okay, I’ll give you marshmallows,” Bruce is the closest to the door and the first to shake Clint’s hand in greeting. He works his way around the table.

Natasha gives him a warm hug. “How was the drive?”

He huffs. “Long. So, what’s this mysterious ‘scavenger hunt’ you’ve invited us on?”

“_After_ dinner,” Tony says. “No work talk at the dinner table. We were just discussing the Grand Canyon. Ever been?”

“Took a girl there once. At sunset. Very romantic.”

As the dinner begins to wind down, dessert being served and scotch poured into glasses, Thor finds himself drifting over to the wide window on the city. The sun is long set, but the glow of the city lights illuminates the landscape. Suddenly Thor feels very, very tired, though it is still fairly early in the evening. He has not been back to this city since the battle had ended. It is healing well from what he’s seen so far.

This is where his fighting with his brother had ended, this very tower. Thor remembers the one small glimmer of hope Loki gave him. A glimpse, behind the madness, of fear, regret, longing. And then the knife in his side and Loki slipping out of his grip, over the edge. Thor had been so furious at the betrayal, so frustrated at his inability to break through Loki’s madness, to _understand_ what had happened.

Now he just feels sadness pooling in his chest. He leans against the window frame and takes a long breath, sipping at the scotch in his glass. It’s far, far from enough to get him drunk but it’s something to do to take away from the feeling of heaviness in his limbs, the ache of loss.

“Hey, Thor,” Steve comes up behind him. “We’re…you okay?”

Thor smiles in return. “Fine.”

“We’re going to get started.”

“Excellent,” He says and follow Steve into the common room without giving any indication that anything was wrong.

The briefing begins.

“So I don’t know how much you all heard about what happened in Washington…” Natasha starts.

“Heard about it? Are you kidding, I TiVo-ed your testimony,” Clint says, nudging her side.

“Ha ha, Barton.”

“I heard the rumors that you took down your own government,” Thor says with a grin. “It caused a very spirited debate between Jane and Darcy one night.”

“Well. That’s one way to put it,” Natasha says.

“SHIELD had been infiltrated by HYDRA,” Steve picks up. He hits a button and the image of a middle aged man in a suit fills the screen. “Pierce had near complete control over our security apparatus and he was a HYDRA operative the whole time. HYDRA, back during the war, used the Tesseract to create weapons and they tried to make more enhanced soldiers…” Steve trails off.

“The Tesseract is safe in Asgard,” Thor says. “I saw it placed in our vaults myself.”

“Yes. But the scepter wasn’t,” Tony responds. Clint stiffens. “It was taken into SHIELD custody. Which, as we’ve now seen…is HYDRA’s custody.”

“They were just going to test it,” Bruce explains. “That’s what they said. We needed to learn more about it if we wanted to learn how to combat it.”

“That’s what they said. I really wanted them to keep it here, I tried to explain that Dr. Banner and I would be the best minds to work on it, but they insisted on taking the first crack at it. To steal it out from under us, as it turns out.” Tony flicks his wrist and the image of the scepter appears on the screen. Thor easily can picture Loki standing, holding it, leaning on it dressed in his armor. In his mind’s eye, he looks like he’s bowing under its weight. Like he’s tired. Thor doesn’t remember how he really looked. All his memories have become too entwined with Loki’s last day, on Svartalfheim.

“And where is it now?”

“Well…” Tony says. “We don’t know.”

“You don’t _know?”_ Clint sputters. “What the hell do you mean you don’t know?”

“We don’t know,” Steve says dully.

“It disappeared from the secure facility where it was being stored,” Natasha says. “Sometime between when it was transported there after the battle of New York and when SHIELD fell.”

“Sometime between…_Jesus_, Nat.”

“We’re not sure. We hadn’t figured on HYDRA infiltrating SHIELD. Now that we know there’s no way to track when it vanished, no way to trust our records. But we have to find it.”

“I should have taken with me back to Asgard with the Tesseract,” Thor growls. He folds his arms across his chest, frustrated with the complicated nature of Midgardian politics.

“We should have destroyed it!” Clint cries. “We should have destroyed it, rather than let it fall into the wrong hands. _Again_.”

“We don’t even know if it can be destroyed.” Bruce shakes his head. “We know _nothing_ about it.”

All heads seem to swivel towards Thor. “I do not know any more than you.”

“Are you sure? You don’t remember anything, where Loki got it, where it was made, what it does?” Natasha prompts.

“We _know_ what it does,” Clint mutters.

“I know nothing, I am sorry, friends. The scepter is not of Asgardian make. I’d never seen it before Loki came through the portal - he must have been given it by whoever he met in the Void, whoever gave him command of the Chitauri armies.”

“And Loki still won’t say anything?”

Thor shakes his head. “He will say nothing. He refused to speak of what happened in the Void.”

“If you’d just let us keep him down here, SHIELD might have wrung it out of him before long-”

Thor stands abruptly, suddenly furious. “I thought I made clear how I felt about the use of torture on my brother.”

Tony raises his hands in surrender. “You’re right. Sorry. Bad joke. But back to the task at hand. Loki’s scepter.”

“It wasn’t his,” Thor sighs. “I don’t know who it belonged to, before Loki…took it, was given it, whatever…in the Void. And I have found nothing since that would reveal its origin.”

“Nothing in SHIELD’s files either,” Natasha says. “Even before they scrubbed them when HYDRA fell, there was nothing. It looks like it came out of the portal with Loki.”

“And we’re not _actually_ sure what it does,” Steve says. “It did a _lot_ during the battle. It’s not just…energy bolts, mind control, reversing the portal. Reviewing the footage, we think that it’s possible it can be used in other ways. And that might be what HYDRA wanted it for.”

“Could that have just been Loki’s magic? He’s powerful on his own, right?” Bruce asks.

Thor shakes his head. “Loki never needed a staff to channel his power.”

“What, no magic wand?” Tony waves his pen around.

Thor smiles and shakes his head. “No. While some of the things you described were within the bonds of Loki’s powers - the bolts, especially - the others had to be from the scepter itself.”

“And he couldn’t have learned that stuff in the Void?” Bruce looks around. “It would be helpful to us if Loki’s scepter doesn’t actually do anything. If it was just a channel, something to redirect Loki’s power...”

“If he had, he would have-” _Used those powers on Svartalfheim_. Thor cuts himself off with a sigh and hopes the others haven’t noticed. “I don’t think he did. But you are right, I suppose it’s possible. I do not know.”

“Then how are we supposed to find this thing?” Clint laughs. “We have no idea what it is, where it’s from, what it does, whose it is, or where it is now. We’ve got nothing.”

“I’ve got a bit of a head start. I’m working on updating the program we used to track the Tesseract. It’s a long shot, and it will probably result in some false results…okay, a _lot_ of false results, but we might get some leads.” Tony flicks his wrist again and the programming that led them to the Tesseract appears on the screen.

“And there’s one thing we do know,” Steve says. “HYDRA has it. So to find Loki’s scepter, we have to find HYDRA.”

“They want to go after it,” He finishes. Jane leans against the counter, frowning. “Loki’s scepter. They’ve asked me to join, to officially reform the Avengers.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t his. Loki’s.”

Thor blinks. He hadn’t realized he’d called it that. “It wasn’t. That’s just what they have been calling it, it’s…it's caught on.”

Jane purses her lips. “Are you sure about all of this? Rejoining the Avengers?”

“Of course. I’ve also secured permissions to return it to Asgard after we find it. Our vaults will be the safest place for it, but if I don’t help they will not allow me-”

“Come on, Thor, you know what I’m talking about.” Thor folds his arms across his chest. “You’re still mourning. I’m not trying to…tell you want to do, I’m just worried that this is going to be hard. That it’s going to be painful. What did they say when you told them what happened to Loki?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing. Because,” Thor pauses for a moment. “I did not tell them.”

Jane gapes at him. “You didn’t tell them?”

“No.”

“Jesus, Thor, I really don’t think this is such a good idea.” Thor gives her a withering look. “At least, I think you should tell them.”

“Why? Why should I tell them? It doesn’t matter. We must find the scepter and return it to Asgard, it does not matter if Loki is alive or dead, he does not matter in all this. I told them the truth - that Odin had sentenced him to life in the prisons, and that he was beyond our questioning. They don’t need to know any more,” He says bitterly.

“What do you think is going to happen if you tell them?”

“You know _exactly_ what will happen,” he scoffs.

“Do I?”

“They will all react like Selvig. _Thank God_, I believe were his exact words. I had held my little brother in my arms as he trembled with pain and struggled for breath, until the light left his eyes and he went cold and the response was _thank God_.”

“Thor, you know he apologized, and you can’t-”

“And I don’t. I do not blame him and I would not blame them for their reactions either. They were hurt by his actions, they deserve to feel relief that he is no longer alive to hurt them again,” Thor has to breathe deeply until the strangling pain in his chest recedes. “But I cannot watch it.”

“Then don’t. You don’t have to do this, you don’t owe them anything.”

“But I do. Because Loki did this to them and I could not stop him. Loki brought this scepter to Earth and I need to help them find it. Then I need to bring it back to Asgard, where it will be safe, and cannot be used to hurt anyone else. I need to…I need to finish what Loki started. Offer them closure.” _Offer yourself closure_, a too-truthful voice says in his mind.

“I’m just worried about you, Thor,” Jane says with a sigh. “I just don’t think this is a good idea.”

“Well else am I meant to do?” Thor snaps uncharitably. He knows that Jane is just trying to help, just trying to protect him. But all summer there has been a simmering frustration at his inaction, like he had been neglecting his duties, even though he _had_ no duties, not anymore. There was nothing for him to _do_. He had walked away from the throne, not answered his friends’ messages from Asgard, and this was the first he had heard from SHIELD or the Avengers since his return.

All summer, he had felt a restless desire for revenge, but there was nothing to take it out on. Loki had gotten his own revenge on the creature that killed him and their mother, leaving Thor adrift, purposeless. Now that he finally has direction, has _something to do_, he cannot turn away. “I have nothing else, no purpose, but this quest. This is all I can do for Loki now.”

Jane just looks tired of the argument. “I can’t stop you, obviously. And I’ll be here for you when you need to talk.”

He stays the night with Jane and in the morning, packs his things and returns to New York. He startles Bruce, drinking coffee on the rooftop.

“Good morning, Banner,” He claps him on the back with a smile. “Ready to get started?”

Thus begins the ‘Autumn of Failures’, as Tony dubs it after one particularly frustrating dead end. Months pass with middling success.

HYDRA’s trail vanishes and pops up again just as quickly, an observation sometimes-Avenger Sam Wilson says is particularly fitting when he joins them on his first mission and sees the board they’ve set up, with all their clues and failures laid out along the wall. This earns a slightly bemused look from Steve. 

“All I’m saying is, wasn’t this the point? Cut one head down, five more grow in its place, something like that.”

“That’s what Zola said in Jersey.” Steve frowns. “We’ll probably never completely root it out but if we go after the heads, eventually they’ll slip up and reveal what they’ve been trying to hide.” Steve and Sam exchange a look.

“Yeah, you’re right about that.”

For not the first time, Thor feels as though Steve is hiding something from the team. But no one else seems to notice, and he is not in any place to start making accusations, so he lets it go.

They catch the first base by surprise. The ensuing fight is short but brutal. In the end they manage to take one of the HYDRA agents alive, only to watch him bite down on a capsule and die seizing, foaming at the mouth.

“Dammit,” Steve groans.

“Classic move,” Natasha says. “I wonder where he hid the cyanide.”

“In the pen? Maybe sewn into his clothes,” Clint speculates.

“We’ve still got a lot of info,” Bruce points out, shifting through the papers. “Nothing specific on the scepter, but we’ve got a lot more information on HYDRA than we did fifteen minutes ago.”

“No one to interrogate, but we’ve got a lot to work with,” Comes Tony’s voice, filtered through the Iron Man mask. “Let’s start boxing it up.”

They spend the entire day boxing up documents and maps and HYDRA equipment to bring it back to the Avengers tower and then the rest of the night laying out their findings on the board. Two separate orders of Chinese food, six pots of coffee, and a bottle of scotch later and they’ve created a massive web of connections, leads, and locations.

“Okay, this is…this is a start.”

“It’s more than a start,” Thor responds brightly. The productivity strengthens his resolve to find the scepter. “We’ve got much to do, friends.”

“A _lot_ of work,” Natasha groans, from her place on the floor. “So much work.”

“Well, we’ve got time, and allies. We’ll split up, tackle each lead as they come, and work our way through the web.”

“Rogers, we should really bottle up your enthusiasm and sell it, we’d make millions.”

“Stark, do you actually need any more money?” Clint asks with a half smile.

“I do, when I’m footing the bill for you five. Or do you want to start going dutch?”

“Oh no, I’m more than happy to take your money, please, keep it coming oh wise and charitable millionaire.”

Bruce is already snoring, cheek flat on the table. Thor stands and studies the picture of the scepter on the board. Steve comes up behind him and claps him on the shoulder.

“Let’s get some rest. We’ll get started tomorrow.”

Thor doesn’t know when he really starts thinking of the scepter as Loki’s. It’s a gradual process, starting with a few slips here and there. At first, he continues to make halfhearted denials that the scepter belonged to Loki - an attempt to redirect the focus to the mysterious forces who had given it to him. But the others have spent too long calling it ‘Loki’s scepter’ to call it anything else, and over time Thor finds himself thinking of it like that. _Loki’s scepter_.

So looking for the scepter, turns into looking for _Loki’s_ scepter. Then turns into looking for Loki.

He finally admits to himself that he’s looking for his brother a few weeks into the quest. Somehow being useful to the Avengers had morphed into a private, personal quest to find Loki. Not find him alive - no, the near constant nightmares and agonizing grief and guilt mingled together have strangled that last hope. But he can perhaps find some trace of Loki in this scepter, find a way to understand what happened to him.

Even that has another layer, one that he doesn’t want to acknowledge. He’s looking for a way to give him a funeral, the one he hadn’t had the time or capacity for on Svartalfheim. He’s looking to bury his brother and eventually that desire becomes inextricably linked to finding the scepter.

There is a whole series of abandoned buildings they spend a month trawling through, without much luck. There are storage lockers, and empty storefronts, and apartments that they search, all dead ends.

One weekend, Steve and Sam ask Thor to accompany them on a lead. Sometimes they would do this, take off on their own leads. Natasha usually went with them, but she had mysteriously vanished with Clint for the weekend.

Thor feels mild irritation at the secrecy of his teammates, but with the secrets he keeps himself, he cannot quite blame them. And he does not further question when Steve asks him to come along.

This particular lead is a cabin in the middle of the woods. They land the jet in a nearby field and hike the last quarter mile to the cabin. It’s abandoned, but there is evidence that someone had been here recently. There’s half eaten soup in a bowl on the table, cold but not yet moldy. The fire in the stove is out, but the heat in the cabin had not completely dissipated.

“This does not seem like a HYDRA base,” Thor remarks. He looks through the papers on the desk. It’s just local newspapers, a couple flyers for events, a torn page out of a book, a shopping list. He doesn’t quite miss Steve palming something and tucking it into his pocket.

“I think it’s a safehouse,” Sam says.

“Used by HYDRA?” Thor sets the shopping list down. “There is no sign of them.”

“Another dead end,” Steve sighs.

Thor goes out to search the perimeter of the cabin. There are no outbuildings, no disturbed dirt to suggest anything has been buried. There’s a fire pit with the remains of a fire, the edges of paper poking through the ash. Someone has been burning things, but they’ve done too good a job. Except for some blank edges, the paper has been reduced to ash.

There’s a late autumn storm brewing. Thor can feel the electricity in the air calling to that in Mjolnir. The wind rustles the dying leaves on the trees as Thor heads back to the cabin to tell Steve what he’s found. The wind carries snippets of a conversation.

“…definitely been here, not long ago.”

“HYDRA doesn’t seem to be on his tail, we’d have seen something…”

“…do you really think he remembers anything…”

The wind shifts direction and Steve sighs. Thor’s close enough to have alerted them to his presence and the conversation ceases.

“I found the remains of a fire, all was burned. No clues remain.” Thor has heard enough to know that Steve has an additional agenda in this search.

“Damn.” Steve looks back at the cabin with some unnameable emotion on his face.

“We should return,” Thor says. “It’s going to storm.” On cue, there’s a distant rumble of thunder.

“Right,” Steve says, but seems like he can’t tear himself away from the cabin. When he does, there’s something like grief in his eyes.

Thor claps his back and gives him a small smile. He doesn’t offer to talk, or push him to explain himself, but hopes that eventually Steve will share with him whatever odd private quest he seems to be on.

SHIELD finally captures a live HYDRA agent and manages to thwart his suicide attempt before he can swallow the cyanide tablet. They send over the videos of the interrogation. It feels perverse, but the Avengers spend an evening watching them with pizzas and beer. It’s mostly boring. The suspect refuses to answer any questions, no matter how many times they are asked, no many how many carrots are dangled in front of his nose, sticks held at his back. Thor thinks he might finally see what Midgard calls torture, but the tapes end abruptly. The rest is conveyed by a written report.

“I can’t say I condone it,” Tony says, reading the transcripts. “But they did do a thorough job.”

“Smart, not recording this part,” Natasha says. “No evidence.”

“But can we trust that the information is even accurate?” Bruce asks. He sets down his file with a scowl. “One, SHIELD is giving us this. SHIELD that was HYDRA until a few months ago? Who’s to say this isn’t information that someone we’ve missed, someone whose cover held, isn’t purposefully feeding us to throw us off HYDRA’s trail?”

“I could check it out,” Natasha says. “Sneak in, make sure there aren’t copies of the missing tapes, or transcripts with conflicting intel.”

“Two, and even if this is exactly what their prisoner said,” Bruce continues. “I don’t really know if we can rely on a confession obtained under torture. Once the pain starts…people will say anything to get it to stop.”

“I can’t say I feel great about this,” Steve says.

“That’s a good point.” Clint grabs another slice of pizza. “But it’s all we got right now. Unless you’ve managed to work a miracle, Miracle Man.”

“Nope, no miracles here, only a dedicated and careful application of tech and programming skills honed over years of-”

“Stark,” Steve raises an eyebrow at him. “Do you have something or not?”

“Okay. No. Not in a concrete sense…no.”

“So we go with the stuff they got in the interrogation.”

“I agree with Barton,” Thor says. “We have nothing else. It does not sit easily with me either, Steve. But...”

Steve sighs. "It's all we've got."

“Okay,” Natasha says. “Let’s start putting it on the board.”

Thor’s become a man obsessed. He thinks little of Asgard at all these days. He’s heard nothing from his father or his friends, and assume that they’re getting along well without him. He calls Jane frequently, but starts to find it difficult to concentrate on her excited talks about her findings. He knows he’s growing distant and that that’s unfair, but he can think of little else but finding Loki’s scepter.

“Is everything okay?” Jane asks, worried, on a phone call where he had drifted off and forgotten to listen to her.

“Yes, yes, everything’s fine,” he hastens to reassure. “I apologize, you were saying that Darcy found…”

“Thor, that was ten minutes ago. I thought you were listening, I was telling you about the conference next month.” She sounds annoyed.

Thor winces, but knows her annoyance is justified. “I am sorry. I didn’t mean…I just was distracted.”

“Yeah, you’ve been distracted a lot lately,” she says bitterly.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m just worried,” She sighs. “Are you sure you don’t want me to redirect to New York? I can layover there instead of Boston on my way back to England.”

“No, it’s quite alright, Jane. We spend all our time working, and I’ll see you at your Midwinter celebrations…”

“New Year’s. Right.” She doesn’t quite sound satisfied.

Thor almost relents, tells her to come. But he fears that in person the distance between them caused by his obsession will be even more evident. That she will fret and worry and eventually make him tell them about Loki, or do it herself. And he doesn’t want to see her until he has _results_. Until he knows that he can put this quest - and his brother - to rest.

Does the fact that when he looks at her, he sees her with tears streaming down her cheeks and blood covering her hands and smudged on her cheek, have anything to do with it? No, he tells himself. Besides, that will go away too. Once he finds Loki’s scepter, it will all _go away_. The pain will fade, the guilt and grief will fade. Wiped clean once he finally has _closure_. 

“I do love you,” He says. “And I am sorry.”

Jane is quiet on the other end for a long moment and then she sighs. “I know. I’ll talk to you later, I have a meeting to get to. I’ll see you at New Year's.” And she hangs up.

Thor is left feeling like he’s made a mistake.

As unsavory as SHIELD’s interrogation techniques are, the information from the transcripts do send them on their first solid lead in weeks. A warehouse, on the outskirts of a small town. It’s a promising lead, even lining up with some of Tony’s tracking data. Hope is palpable on the jet. But when they get there, it’s empty, just like all the others had been.

“Okay, disappointing,” Tony says through the comms. “But we do have some leftover equipment in the garage, I might be able to get some analytics on origins, if we can get the supplies, maybe we can track buyers, set up a sting.” He cuts off on the comms as JARVIS pings in to tell him he’s got results.

Thor and Steve take up searching the rest of the compound, while Nat and Clint check out the roof and guard their position, and Tony and Bruce get wound up analyzing the leftover equipment.

In the last room they search, there is a single diagram of the scepter. There is nothing written on it but measurements. Nothing else of use remains.

“Damn,” Thor says under his breath. “Damn!” He lets the diagram fall to the floor. “Dammit!”

“We’ll find something else,” Steve says. “Stark said on the comms…”

“We’re getting nowhere. Loki’s scepter…” Thor sighs. “I really thought we would find it here.”

“I know. HYDRA’s good at shuffling things around. We’ll find something. We will.” Steve sounds more like he’s trying to convince himself than Thor.

And Thor is let with the sour taste of disappointment in the back of his throat.

_I didn’t do it for him_.

Loki’s body is deathly still in his arms. His head is limp where Thor cradles it, heedless of the black, poisoned blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.

“No, no, no…” It comes out a low moan now, where a moment ago it had been a desperate plea.

“Thor, lay him back.” Jane is still frantic, still desperate. She's still fighting to save him.

“It’s no use,” He manages to gasp around choking sobs. But her hands are swatting his away, her fingers pressing into Loki’s neck where his veins are still stained black. “It’s no use.”

“Lay him down, I can start CPR, come on, Thor, keep it together.”

Thor is too stunned, too wrapped up in the dull shock to stop her as she shoves him away. Hope stirs a tiny bit in his heart, but is quickly stamped out as Loki’s hand falls limp beside him. The veins in his wrists are stained dark gray, like the ones in his throat. His palm is covered with scarlet blood. The tips of his fingers are ghost white. Thor glances at his face and Loki's eyes are open, brilliant green, staring at nothing.

“Jane,” Thor gasps. “Jane, stop.”

“If we can keep the blood flow…get back…in time...” She’s panting with exertion as she pounds on his chest, feels at his neck for a pulse. She curses and starts again.

“Jane, stop. Stop. It’s too late.”

Her chest compressions slow, stop. She lifts her hands, soaked in scarlet, from his chest.

“Thor, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I...I tried-” She’s crying too now, fat tears dripping down her cheeks. There’s blood on her cheek and her shirt where she had bent down to check his breathing.

Thor shakes his head, beyond words. She falls back onto her heels. Thor gathers up the body, cradling him to his chest. He curls around him, tucking Loki’s head under his chin and rocks him like he could still offer some comfort, some protection. Jane’s hand settles on his back, rubbing a circle as tears begin to flow.

Thor holds Loki's body, weeping, until the body goes cold and they must leave.

“Hey, Thor,” Steve startles him out of his reverie. He had been staring out blankly at the lights of the city. “Jet’s ready to go. You good?”

Thor flips his hammer into his palm. “Of course.” He affects an easy grin. “Let’s go.”

This mission is the most frustrating yet. Strucker has clearly long seen them coming. The base is deserted, covered in a layer of soft, undisturbed snow. It’s been cleared out of any useful information.

“Hey…hey, guys,” Tony says through their comms. “You should check this out.”

In the main room, spray paint has been used to draw crude cartoons of each of them. Above them is a rough drawing of Loki, holding the scepter.

The words _miss me?_ are scrawled above the drawings. _You’re too late_. And _Avengers stay home_.

“So Strucker knows we’re looking for the scepter,” Steve says.

“And we’re 100% sure Loki’s not involved?” Natasha asks.

Thor, feeling numb, shakes his head. “Impossible. HYDRA is merely trying to mock us.” It is also impossible for them to know Loki’s fate, but the little _miss me?_ still drives a stake through his heart. It must refer to Strucker, or HYDRA, but Thor cannot take his eyes off it. Neither can Steve, who’s squinting up at the words with a deep frown on his face.

“Well,” Natasha says. It seems like she drops the topic, though she still studies Thor with some suspicion. “I guess this is another dead end.”

Later, in the kitchen of the Avengers tower while they’re eating a late dinner, tempers and frustrations are running high after the second major disappointment in a row.

“We’re getting _nowhere_,” Clint says. “It feels like we’re fucking going backwards.”

“It does kind of seem like we’re getting further from it,” Natasha says. “Maybe we should take a break.”

“We can’t take a break!” Tony says. “Loki’s scepter could be the key to understanding what’s going on up there,” He gestures at the ceiling with his fork.

“I don't know if we’ll ever fully understand what went on,” Steve says. “This is bigger than all of us, and I think there's way more going on than we’ll fully comprehend.”

“It’s true,” Thor says. “I agree - there are many unanswered questions. The scepter will help us understand some of them, I’m sure, though it might not hold all the answers you seek.”

“But it’s going to _help_,” Tony insists.

“Not if we can’t find it,” Natasha returns.

They fall quiet for a minute. “So what?” Bruce breaks the silence. “Do we give up? Take a break? How much of a time clock do we think we’re on here?”

“We have to assume we’re on a time clock. But with Loki locked up-” Tony taps the fork against the table. Thor gets up from his seat and goes to the counter, refilling his glass of water. It gives him an excuse to hide his face. “At least we don’t have to worry about that.”

“Yeah, but whoever Loki allied with is still out there,” Natasha says. “And they could be coming for the scepter too.”

“True.”

“And Thor, there’s no way you can-”

“I’m sorry, friends, but I still have no idea where Loki obtained the scepter. And without more information, there’s nothing Asgard can do to help us find it on Earth.”

Clint suddenly casts down his fork, sending it clattering across the table. “We’re running our asses into the fucking ground looking for Loki’s goddamn scepter,” Clint roars. “For what? Huh? Why don’t you drag your ass back to Asgard and ask your crazy ass brother-”

“I can’t do that,” Thor says, throat suddenly tight.

“Oh, what? You don’t want to face the shit in your own house-”

“That is not-”

“Look, I get that you’re angry or hurt, or whatever, but you need to own up to what _your brother_ did. You need to get him to talk, and if Asgard’s not willing to do what it takes to _make_ him-”

“Loki is dead.” Thor’s declaration rings out in the stunned silence that descends in the kitchen. “Loki’s dead.” Thor lets all the air out of his lungs in a long exhale.

“Dead?” Clint says dully. “He’s dead?” He sounds relieved and that relief is the knife that bores into Thor’s heart.

“Yes. He is dead.” Thor will not look at the others. “I told you the truth when I first returned: our father sentenced him to life imprisonment in our cells, in isolation. But…” Thor sighs heavily. “We were under attack. Loki was the only one with the skills I needed to defeat the monster that killed our mother, to take my revenge, and to save Jane’s life. I took him from his cell. I took him to the field of battle. And then I could do nothing but watch as that beast drove a spear through his chest. He died in my arms, from wounds received saving my life.”

_I didn’t do it for him_. His hands shake and he squeezes them into fists. “I did not tell you because I know that his death would come as a relief to you. That you would wish to celebrate and you would deserve to. He caused so much destruction and chaos to this city. Caused you so much pain. But he was my brother and I loved him. No matter what he did, I cannot deny that I loved him. And his death has…” He takes a shaky breath. “It haunts me. The grief is a hole in my heart I cannot heal. I cannot ask that you not rejoice. But I would ask that you at least wait until I am out of the room to begin.”

He doesn’t wait to see if they honor his request. He flees the kitchen and goes to the roof, to look out on the city lights. There are no stars here, no sign of the worlds outside of Earth’s atmosphere except for a black void. So he looks at the buildings instead and imagines the millions of small, fleeting mortal lives that each speck of light represents.

Steve comes to find him not long after he fled.

“You do not wish to celebrate with the others?” He asks.

Steve sighs. “They’re not celebrating, man.”

“You do not have to lie to me.”

Steve winces. “Really, I wouldn’t call it…celebrating.”

“They are relieved. They feel justice have been served, and I understand.” Thor looks at his hands. “Though he did not receive a death sentence upon his return to Asgard and it was not justice that sealed his fate, but _me_, when I failed to protect him on Svartalfheim.”

“It doesn’t sound like it was your fault. It was a fight…it was…just one of those damn things that happen.”

“Yes. I suppose. Still, I cannot help but feel that it was my fault. And I cannot,” Tears sting at his eyes. “I cannot forget the feeling of his body in my arms. His blood upon my hands.” Steve looks stricken. “And I do miss him. In truth, I have been mourning my brother for years. After he fell into the Void, I believed him to be dead and when he returned…I felt as though he still was, though he was standing before me. But then, near the end.” Thor turns away from the city and looks Steve in the face. “It was as though there was a glimmer of him returned. Angry, scheming, on the edge of madness…but clever, and foolishly sure of himself, determined. The brother I knew was still there, buried beneath whatever had happened before. And I saw it just in time to watch him die, painfully.”

“I’m sorry,” Steve says earnestly.

“I was too stubborn to ask him any of the questions that could help us now. I was angry that he did not tell me in the first place. I was upset so I avoided him until I had need of his magic. So no, I know not where he obtained the scepter. I know not where he went. I know not who supplied him with his armies. I know not what happened to him, or…or even what made him let go and fall into the Void in the first place. Whether or not he believe he would survive the fall.” Thor scrubs a hand over his face, suddenly exhausted. “And now he is dead and we will never know the answers.”

“We’ll keep searching,” Steve says. “HYDRA can’t hide forever. And when we find the scepter, maybe…maybe it will answer some things.”

“Yes. Closure.”

Steve nods. “Closure.”

The red light recedes but the screams continue, eventually fading to sobs.

“Impressive,” The scientist says. “Highly impressive.” The force of the power had spilled a jar of marking ink over the file. Strucker scowls at it, cursing whoever was foolish enough to leave the open jar so close.

Irritation at the ruined file is soon disrupted by a greater problem. “Sir,” The guardsman is out of breath. “We must evacuate. They are-”

“Sound the alarm,” Strucker grabs the first three pages of the file, the ones that contain the most information. “Get her back to her twin. Get them ready for transport back to base.” He balls the pages up and stuff them into his pocket. “We must be long gone before the Avengers find us.”

The guards drag the girl away, who's now quieted. Scientists begin to pack up their research, soldiers destroying evidence and equipment behind them.

The alarm sounds as the compound turns into a swirl of frenetic energy, as the HYDRA base is scrubbed ahead of the Avengers’ invasion.

Thor avoids everyone for two days after telling them the truth about Loki. He gives them their space to celebrate, they give him his to mourn. The first night, his sleep is plagued with nightmares, familiar ones. Loki tipping over the edge and falling, just out of reach. Bleeding out from the Kursed’s chest wound, but turning against Thor now, wild and mad, cackling as blood coats his teeth.

Thor spends the next entirely sleepless night obsessively turning the events of Svartalfheim over and over in his head, thinking through all he could have done differently to change the outcome and save Loki’s life. Near dawn, he gives up trying to sleep and kneels, closes his eyes, and murmurs the funeral prayer under his breath until the sun has fully risen.

The morning of the third day, Natasha comes to find him at breakfast. “We’ve got a lead. A good lead,” She says, sounding hopeful.

“Well,” Thor conjures his best smile. “When do we leave?”

This compound is deserted, but obviously not as thoroughly scrubbed as the last had been. There are clear track marks in the mud outside the buildings, and debris strewn across the scene. Paper, files, even the remains of someone’s lunch laying out on a desk. They left in a hurry.

“Okay, let’s take a look around,” Steve says. “There could be more evidence lying around. Be careful, though, there still could be dangers lurking.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they booby-trapped the place,” Clint says.

It does feel eerie. There’s an unnatural silence hanging over the building. Their steps and movements echo against the stone, and a heavy, oppressive air hangs over them.

Bruce is already starting to piece together some of the papers scattered across the floor. The rest split up to search the rest of the compound.

Thor takes a long staircase down into a basement. His cape disturbs the leaves on the steps behind him, making a sound like insects crawling over the stone. But there are no living things anywhere to be seen. The basement is a series of laboratories, scattered with broken beakers and test tubes. At the end of the hallway there is a particularly large lab, with a table in the center. Restraints dangle towards the floor. There’s a folder on the counter along the wall. Thor flips it open, hoping it can explain this odd laboratory, but the file is incomplete and someone has spilled ink over the pages. Only vague and confused fragments of notes remain.

_…uncontrolled…..need to check on……connection with……request……screaming…_

Thor frowns at the page. The hairs on the back of his neck and his arms raise. Something is off about this laboratory. It feels wrong, twisted, like there’s some kind of dark magic hanging in the air.

He turns the page. _Breakthrough……witch……more volunteers……unexplained……_

“Hello, brother.” Thor turns, heart thundering in his chest. Loki is perched on the counter, looking amused. He is transparent, barely a shade in the laboratory. Thor stops reading the report and sets it aside. “Miss me?” 

“So you’ve decided to haunt my waking hours now? You’ve not had enough fun haunting my dreams?” A hallucination, it must be. Caused by whatever odd energy is in this place, and his sleepless nights. It cannot be a ghost, his brother cannot have been cursed to this shade form, he died well, he _must_ have reached Valhalla, must have been reunited with their mother-

Loki smiles. “I’m naught but a conjuration of your own mind. You have no one to blame but yourself.” He’s becoming a bit more solid, surrounded by shimmering light. In the glow of it, Thor can see the gaping hole in his chest, the blood slowly dripping from the corner of his mouth, dribbling down his chin. “What would you do, Thor? If I were truly here now? Would you call your Avengers friends to finish me off? Do it yourself? Grip my shoulders and shake me until I tell you where to find the scepter?”

“Yes. I would ask you about the scepter. I would ask you where you went when you fell. Things I did not ask when I had the chance because I was too blinded by anger and frustration with you to wonder.” Thor closes the folder and walks towards the apparition. “I would clean the blood from your face. I would bind your wound and wrap you in my cape and hold you until your pain faded and you could sleep. I would carry you, if I had to, off that barren world. I would take you from that cursed place, from the cold cells, and I would ask you where you went when you fell. I would ask you why you felt you had to fall, why you could not have reached out and taken my hand.”

Loki’s ghostly green eyes are wide and shining. “You have to let me go.”

“I cannot.”

“You must bury me.”

“I cannot.”

“It is time. I am dead.” A fresh trickle of blood slides from his mouth to his chin.

Thor closes his eyes.

His communications device crackles on. “Thor, I’m getting some wild readings from that lab you’re checking out,” Bruce says. “I wouldn’t stay in there any longer than you have to.” Thor opens his eyes.

Loki is still there, still staring at him. “You have to tell me goodbye.”

There’s a clanging in the hallway, the sound of the Iron Man suit's guns firing. Thor glances towards the door and when he looks back, Loki’s ghost is gone.

“Sorry, guys!” Tony says through the earpiece. “Whoops! Locked door has been…uh, defeated. I got into the records office…most of them are still intact. And with the digital replication software to fill the gaps in, I think we can work with this.”

Thor takes the folder from the laboratory bench. “I have found something here as well.”

“Thor, I’d really get out of there if I were you.”

“Never fear, Banner,” He says. “I doubt there’s anything in here that could harm an Asgardian.”

He casts one look back to the desk where Loki had been perched. He wants to believe he sees a spark of green in the air around where he had been, but knows it is just his own imagination, tricking him. _Tell me goodbye_.

“No,” Thor tells the empty room. “Not yet.”

The information Tony finds in the locked room leads them to Sokovia. They land in the snow and are immediately attacked.

“I think we might be on the right track,” Steve says, as a blast strikes his shield. Tony flies overhead.

“The central building is protected by some kind of energy shield,” JARVIS reports. “Strucker’s technology is well beyond any other HYDRA base we’ve taken.”

“We’re definitely on the right track then,” Clint looses an arrow.

A blast strikes just to Thor’s left, giving him a close look at the weapons they’ve deployed. “Loki's scepter must be here. Strucker couldn't mount this defense without it.” He pauses, feeling weighed down. _I didn’t do it for him_. “At long last.”

_You must bury me. You have to tell me goodbye._

Loki had not been given a funeral. He had laid Loki’s body in the sands and left him on that dead planet. His father had refused to allow anyone to go retrieve the corpse. Thor had given him the only funeral he could: private whispers of the funeral prayer to himself, whenever he could.

He could not give his brother a funeral. But he could give him this. He could find out what this odd scepter _was_, what connection it had to his brother and the year he had been missing.

“At long last,” He says again, to himself this time.

**Author's Note:**

> Ah, another 'five minutes late with Starbucks' fic! I really am working my way through the canon in the year of our Lord 2019, aren't I?
> 
> Is Loki actually dead though? Or is he safely behind the illusion of Odin on Asgard, hmm? Technically, I wanted this to be as canon compliant as possible, and I have as little idea of how Loki survived as canon does, so your guess as to how he survived being impaled is as good as mine. The attempted resuscitation would seem to suggest he was either really out, dead or near dead, or a very, very good, committed actor who somehow tricked them about his carotid pulse which is impossible so I don't really know.
> 
> This idea came to be around the same time as [a fic I wrote last fall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16896960/chapters/39690879), about Thor trying to deal with being around a grief-stricken Wanda post-Age of Ultron. I wondered if the Avengers knew Loki was dead, since they never really talk about it on screen. I also wondered about Thor calling it _Loki's_ scepter when it had clearly been given to him by someone else (Thanos, but they don't know this yet). I finally managed to figure out how to put it all together and, ta da, almost 9k words of slightly plodding angsty sad fic! :-) 
> 
> I do have an idea of what movie they were seeing at the beginning, but to avoid spoiling said movie or influencing your ideas of what it was, I'm not going to say what movie I was thinking about. But anything where someone is impaled through the chest, falls or jumps to their death, etc etc. 
> 
> Steve, Sam, and Natasha are clearly on their secret 'looking for Bucky' mission. I think Thor and Steve could have some nice cathartic talks if they weren't so busy trying to keep secrets from everyone.
> 
> Title is from the classic American folk song 'O Death'. There are many, many covers of it by my personal favorite is [Kate Mann's.](https://open.spotify.com/track/1wYidRIZGWVtBmOaIEj6SC)
> 
> Comments are gold! [Follow me on tumblr](https://bereft-of-frogs.tumblr.com/) for more angst, writing progress updates, and sometimes frogs. [I also now have a twitter!](https://twitter.com/bereft_of_frogs) Well. I've always had a twitter, I'm just actually trying to use it more now.


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